Even when President Trump succeeds, the media spin still has to be negative. Sometimes that spin is visual.
This last week President Trump took note of the problem. The New York Post headlined the story as follows:
Trump accuses Time magazine of deliberately using worst photo ‘of all time’ on cover praising peace deal
The Post reported:
President Trump slammed Time magazine early Tuesday for using an unflattering picture for a cover story about ‘his triumph’ in securing the releases of Israeli hostages from Hamas captivity.
‘Time Magazine wrote a relatively good story about me, but the picture may be the Worst of All Time,’ Trump wrote on Truth Social. ‘They ‘disappeared’ my hair, and then had something floating on top of my head that looked like a floating crown, but an extremely small one. Really weird!’
The cover, bearing the headline ‘His Triumph’ featured a portrait shot from below and slightly to the right of the 47th president, giving the viewer a close-up look at Trump’s right ear, cheek, eye and nostril.’
You might wonder who took this odd photograph from below, and whether the president tripped over them. It’s not the worst anti-Trump Time cover — there have been so many nasty, hostile covers — most infamously the photo-shopped one with a crying immigrant tot next to him. But the President’s point is well taken. And in fact Trump’s complaint is well within the tradition of Presidents having an ongoing battle with media cameras – both still and video or live – being aimed in their direction.
Long ago, President Harry Truman was known to grouse that press photographers were always looking for some unfavorable angle to portray him in a photo.
Understanding the power of the photo image, President Kennedy – his inaugural top hat the sole (and uncomfortable, so it was said) exception – refused to wear hats in front of cameras. Famously possessed of great hair always carefully and stylishly brushed, hair which had quickly become his identifier with everyone from political cartoonists to the general public, he flatly refused to be photographed wearing a hat.
Poignantly, on what proved to be JFK’s fatal trip to Dallas in November of 1963 he was presented at a welcoming breakfast with – what else from Texans? – a cowboy hat. Which he refused to wear in front of the cameras, saying: “I’ll put it on in the White House on Monday. If you come up there, you’ll have a chance to see it then.” Note: He said “see it” – not photograph it!
The long and short is that there are politicians aplenty – starting with Presidents – who are acutely aware of how the cameras portray them.
So now comes Time magazine with what certainly seems as a decidedly lousy cover photograph of President Trump that the President himself, like various Presidents before him viewing some of their own photos, thinks is grade-A lousy.
Which raises the obvious point. Was this lousy photo deliberate?
Presidents being the most famously photographed and political person on the planet, it would seem to be impossible for a major media outlet to have a “bad” photo of this or any President. Unless, of course, it is deliberate – and decidedly political.
While being appreciative of the overall Time story that he feels carries a genuinely favorable account of his history-making agreement in the Middle East that secured the release of hostages, Trump has not hesitated to express his disapproval of the magazine’s cover photo.
And, as noted, the unflattering picture raises the obvious point: Finding it impossible to target Trump’s Middle East triumph which has been astonishingly- almost universally- acclaimed in and out of the media, even with the likes of old opponent Hillary Clinton?
Is this cover photo Time’s way of finding a supposedly more subtle way of sticking it to the President? The President so many in the Establishment media have loathed from the moment he came gliding down that Trump Tower escalator in 2015?
Safe to say, this mini-dust up will almost certainly live on forever in the history of the Trump era. Nothing major, just an example in the eyes of Trump and his supporters of how the opposition media works.
And for sure, it will play a part in any future conversations or histories about the role of media photographs in shaping the image of the President of the moment.
So get the popcorn. The debate begins.
